Developer: Raizing
Publisher: Eighting Co., Ltd.
Two Player
Arcade / Sega Saturn / Playstation 4
Author's Note: There are multiple versions of Battle Garegga. Depending on which version you play, that can be the intended version created by developer Raizing, the compromised Western release, the modified versions from Raizing themselves when acquiring feedback to the game, and the more modern releases worked on by M2 which reflect the changes to one key trait of the game's structure. Bare this in mind with what you play.
Battle Garegga is the hardcore of the hardcore. Between the multiple versions which exist, Battle Garegga is held both as a well regarded title from the shoot-em-up catalogue, especially the nineties games. It is also, due to a certain intricate mechanic is one which could cause debate from players of these games regardless of skill, one which has influenced opinion on the game including its developer modifying on multiple versions of Battle Garegga over the decades. Regardless of the version played, and I say this with as much admiration even someone who is way out of his depth with this genre, a bad player who yet is growing to love their aesthetics and craft, Battle Garegga in any form is a punishing little bastard. Even a compromised version can introduce you, as it will, to missiles and beams hitting you from everywhere, which reminds one that, with "bullet hell" games born from the likes of this these games are as much how you learn to dodge attacks, like an obstacle course for twitch game play. As these games pushed the newer hardware of the time with more death bullets to hit you, more so did this become a spectacle of keeping on your toes moving as it was shooting the enemies back.
Naturally I come to this as the player, with no shame, that would rather play these sorts of games with infinite continues, allowing me to appreciate their artistry even if my ship blows up many times. Instead, the gameplay is the learning curve of how, in one play and in all future ones, you eventually learn to "improve" and have your ship blow up less. Frankly, from a controversial perspective, infinite continues should have been a common part of countless games, even if this reflects as much Battle Garegga being an arcade machine you needed to feed coins into for continuous playing; a game like this, even if very short, at a disadvantage in the modern day in terms of value of money, has one advantage that it was always designed to replay and replay until you get good. Even that this has no rapid fire as other games in the genre means that, mechanically depending on which version you play, this was a game you hone and learn to ultimately get a higher score and hopefully keep it without dying.
For a plot, this is set in an alternative nineteen forties, where two brothers called Brian and Jason Wayne make the ill-advised decision, after running a very productive automobile factory, to be paid by a shady organisation called the Federation to switch to manufacturing weapons, which are used by the group to begin a world conquest. The Wayne brothers quickly figure out that they had made an extremely poor decision and use four experimental aircraft to fight against The Federation and destroy the machines they made for them. Set in a "dieselpunk" world of elaborate aerial battle ships and planes, if you boot the game up, this back-story does not appear in the game itself. Battle Garegga becomes just the tale of one of four planes1 trying to survive an entire army of on land and aerial death machines, a period plane and mechanical nerd's wet dream in sprite form, whose aesthetic beyond that evokes, if anything profounder, a horrifying image of the 20th century as mere mechanisation, where your tiny plane, no matter how powerful, is always outmatched and outgunned by mass of opponents or industrial behemoths, trying to survive as a faceless machine against actually terrifying machines. Truthfully, you could find yourself not getting on with the game as it is entirely a mechanical world of planes and war machines without characters or any of the more fantastical/whimsical touches of other shooters of the time. This is not even cosmic sci-fi or biomechanical, entirely pure diesel-industrial machinery and war mayhem in how you obliterate turrets/planes/tanks, which can still be appreciated by the lovingly detailed and hardcore aesthetic. Even if the bosses are merely warships, the final boss merely a red warplane, you can find a pleasure in this game in its intensity on an aesthetical level before you even get to the game play.
Even as someone who prefers his games to have weird elaborate bosses and aesthetically elaborate designs, I admire this for this aesthetic and how well it is presented. Raizing did admittedly make the decision, one they would revise on improved versions of Battle Garegga, that some of the bullets fired at you are drawn more realistically, not necessarily an issue barring that, as I can attest, they can catch you out of nowhere having not seen them, a necessary thing to amend on the later versions as it goes against how you can at least, even in a bullet hell wall of glowing death, see your impending doom and see if you can twitch quick enough out of their way. Admittedly, there is a far more contentious mechanic, one which is Battle Garegga's biggest assets, one which was compromised in certain ports of the original arcade game, and in the future updates from Raizing would be modified. It is their elusive ranking system in how, depending how well you are in the game in skill, the difficulty can ramp on so much that a tactic has been for players to even self sacrifice a life, all so they can clear the dangers of there being so many bullets and hostiles onscreen after them. Obviously if I was a better player, this mechanic would be a greater concern as, with the influence it has elusive in the earliest versions of the game, it eventually makes the game more and more harder to an extreme. It is also fascinating to know however that just for the Japanese only Sega Saturn release, Raizing improved on the game, in how they made bullets more distinct but even in how they added options to modify the game in the options available. The mechanic's original existence is fascinating as artificial intelligence, but in mind to when CAVE eventually made their games as accessible as they did comes to mind, including hardcore difficulty levels for their shooters for the ultra hardcore players but also easier options being available. This is apt to bring up as Shinobu Yagawa, as a member of Raizing who helped programmed Battle Garegga, would move to CAVE and develop games for the company like Muchi Muchi Pork! (2007).
For me, Battle Garegga regardless of my skill level was a pleasure. Whilst my taste is more fantastical, the distinct artistic virtues are significant, and it would be blasphemy not to mention the score by Manabu Namiki, who would eventually move to CAVE too, whose work here is arguably the best aspect of the game. Detroit techno in the least likely of game settings and tones, it nonetheless works beautifully, melding with the intensity of the combat, fighting proto-stealth planes to giant multi-sectioned warships with numerous guns, with the contrast of the atmospheric techno music by Namiki. Tracks like Subversive Awareness have a timely marker of when they were composed but they are timeless in their moodiness. The energy of the game, its darker mechanical setting, with no human beings and pure mechanised destruction, becomes compelling even if you keep dying. The slowdown which was common in these games, when they had to keep up with the number of bullets and explosions onscreen, happened for me mid-play, usually because the plane I preferred using as a special bomb, with collectable missiles to stock up, fired all its stock of homing missiles off everywhere on mass, even if there were thirty plus onscreen. This accidental aspect, alongside the aesthetic virtues of the game from its appearance to the music, compensate for how crushingly difficult it is, let alone if you tried limited deaths down to credits. Less difficult for the sake of difficult, these games benefit how now they are not designed as arcade machines meant to chomp coins anymore, but can be replayed over and over, as you improve and get the skills of the genre slowly. To just try to play even if on infinite continues leads to a symphony of visuals and sound, where I feel no sense of cheating for unlimited credits because the thrill was there nonetheless, one that would lead someone to want to improve to fully appreciate the game.
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1) There are secret planes, from the Raizing game Sorcer Striker (1993), you can access by a password, which brings characters from a fantasy sci-fi setting including a dragon man in for some idiosyncratic contrast.
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